12 Minute Exercise

byAdmin - Cynthia PerkinsonJune 22, 2010

One of the biggest roadblocks that prevent many people from getting the physical activity they need is lack of time, but with the PACE exercise program by Dr. Al Sears, that’s no longer an issue. He says you can reap all the benefits that exercise has to offer in just 12 minutes a day.

You can ditch your jogging shoes, skip the aerobics class and kiss the hours of drudgery in the gym good-bye.

By following an exercise program that is designed to work in synchronicity with your genetic coding, you can drop the pounds, increase lung capacity, improve heart health, boost energy, build stamina, and improve your over-all level of health. One of Dr. Sears patients lost 45 pounds with a mere 45 seconds of exercise at a time.

Dr. Sears tells us that endurance type exercises are perceived by the body as stress, which sets off the stress response system and the cascade of associated negative symptoms. Guess what happens when we are under stress? We store fat.

The liver releases large amounts of sugar into the blood stream. Any excess gets stored as fat. When there are high levels of stress, it is nearly impossible to burn fat.

Furthermore, Dr. Sears tells us that you don’t want to burn fat while you’re exercising. You want to burn fat after you’re done exercising. If you burn fat while you’re exercising, then it trains the body to believe it needs more fat when you exercise. Any exercise lasting longer than 20 minutes begins to burn fat. If you exercise for a short amount of time and then rest, then you will burn fat afterwards.

You may indeed burn more calories with an endurance type of exercise, but there will be less fat loss. In a study out of Laval University in Quebec, they found that people who engaged in short periods of exercise followed by rest achieved 9 percent more weight loss than those who engaged in long duration.

A study out of Colorado found that we can continue to burn fat for up to 16 hours afterwards and studies out of both Stanford and Harvard have found that a mere 10 minutes of exercise is adequate to trigger fat burning.

The explanation for why this is true can be found within our ancient ancestors. Our ancestors engaged in short bursts of activity followed by rest and recovery for their exercise, the only time they engaged in an intense activity for an extended period of time was to chase down a predator. We have inherited the biochemistry of our ancestors, so our bodies respond best when we mimic their activities, which consists of short periods of intensity followed by rest and recovery. Running or doing aerobics for an hour is completely unnatural for our bodies.

Not only are traditional cardio and aerobics unlikely to help you lose weight, but they are actually bad for your heart and lungs. Healthy exercise should increase cardiac output and lung capacity, but endurance type exercise actually the produces the exact opposite effect.

No matter how busy you are, you can probably find 12 minutes to spare to improve your health. There’s no excuses anymore.